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PC Hardware On A SPARC?
Dan Eisner asks: "With the new SunBlades available for around $1000, running Sun hardware at home is finally a real option! (however if you want to get a 3D graphics card, though, it doubles the cost) Yet, there are plenty of PC-based PCI graphics cards with great performance, for as little as $100. Should it be theoretically possible to get a PC PCI video (or any type) card running on a Sparc? I know that PC-based cards expect some functionality from the BIOS, but couldn't this be emulated with a clever driver?"
"The drivers for a huge amount of cards have already been written for Linux, so it would seem to me that once someone made a port for any driver to Sparc, the same techniques could be used to port all kinds of PCI cards.
How great would it be if you could run to CompUSA, pick up any PC, PCI card, and stick it into your Linux-based Sparc at home! Has anyone ever looked into this? I couldn't find any reference to even the idea on the web..."
While a neat idea, I don't think this is as trivial as the poster makes it out to be. What do you think?
...so I'm posting anonymously. The 3d cards in the Sun Blades (and Ultras) don't actually use a standard PCI interface. If a third party is willing to supply 3d graphics hardware for Sun, then Sun will give them specs for a proprietary "high speed" PCI bus resulting in performance similar to AGP.